


A portrait of love

by youwillmakeitoutofthisalive



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23238538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youwillmakeitoutofthisalive/pseuds/youwillmakeitoutofthisalive
Summary: the horizon tries but it's just not as kind on the eyes
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers





	1. slow-dancing in the shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qxllZK8KbI

He's woken up by lightning. A stroke, a blow, a rush of blood to the head.  
His eyelashes slash violently wide open, splitting up the night, and he's silent for a moment, until his mind resets.  
It's not winter any more. But he remains a soldier. Shivers in bed and jumps at thunder, bends his muscles the same way. And his dreams, they're stained with wartime. And they're lonely. And they're frozen.  
Sometimes, lost and found memories will creep up his neck and invade his mind. He's learned not to fight them. He lets them flow, unrolling gently before his eyes, curiously observing, as a stranger watching a movie. And when they're done, he'll watch them dissolve into the waterfalling current of thoughts that most of our human brains are. He's alright, really.  
He looks up at the sky and the ceiling meets him in return. He thinks about golden skin and bright aquamarine.  
Steve is beautiful in the night. Bucky could never understand it.  
As a man who is in love with his best friend, he feels obliged to clarify, in his own head, the fact that Steve is always beautiful.  
But in the nighttime, Steve's voice lowers, as if not to disturb the quiet of the dark. His eyes, all tired from a long day of fighting against a world that is always unfair, no matter what. His muscles, never entirely relaxed, his shoulders almost smaller below the white t-shirt he shrugs into when he gets home. Home. His feet, bare, wandering through the cold tiles of the kitchen. The glass of water sitting beside him on the windowsill, forgotten for the excuse it was, to get up in the dusk and draw.  
Draw a sword in the form of a pencil, through a vulnerable heart in the form of a sheet of paper. Granite. Draw out the sorrow from his insides. Find appeasement in the undeniability of shape and form. But never color. Steve sees the world in black and white, still.  
He's beautiful. Bucky chokes on it. Tries to eat around it but it tastes like the flutter of a bug. Tears burn deep in his throat. He smiles them off. Loving is kind like that. Takes the bitter pain in your stomach and turns it into butterflies.  
He's laying in bed, awake, alone, and still so, without looking, he can feel Steve's hand lazily scratching across the paper, thinking, gazing out the window, far and wide at the same city that saw them grow and fall and fall in love, over and over again.  
This is not a winter soldier sixth sense. It is the sixth sense of familiarity, perception. It is his heart, beating inside Steve's chest, and back under, viceversa. He trips and knocks over a cup, Steve catches it. He's afraid, and Steve cries. He's starting to forget, and Steve reminds him. Over and over again. Steve. Steve. Steve.  
Sometimes, his messy mind gets stuck on the puzzle of life. He's been having all the same thoughts a teenage boy has. He never got the chance of wondering as much as he wonders now. What's all this for?  
That is the only question Steve cannot be the answer to. Every day, Bucky chooses to live. He searches for purpose in the streets, in the stories. He waters plants, they die. Steve gets him a cactus and a succulent, fly-kisses the corner of his mouth. He listents to Mac Miller. He goes to a museum and doesn't understand modern art, just like he didn't understand classical art either. His favorite art is Steve's drawings. Steve tells him drawing is not an artform, but a way of processing the world, to digest it better. So he needs it like foor or water. So be it. From your eyes until your fingertips. Bucky gets it. He wants something for himself, too. He writes sometimes, but it comes out cluttered. It's fine. Bucky's learning to forgive himself. Be patient. Take a nap, feel less stressed when you wake up. Or don't. Meditate. Let time pass.  
He takes care of himself now.  
He's learning how to like things again. He likes rainy days, and he likes to walk through the sidewalks of New York, and he likes the crazy people, all over eachother, piled up, screaming in the middle of Times Square, crowding department stores. They're flabbergasting.  
It's been three years since he got back his name, his peace. Three years of being a human again. Of being reborn. He had to do it all over. Learn how to talk and walk like the rest of us. Laugh like it matters. Cry like it means something. Stop lying, stop hiding, stop tip-toeing around. There's no one behind you, no need to look over your shoulder at each step you take. No more running, or greeting his teeth till his gum line bleeds. Reminding himself, at first, that he was safe here. No reason to escape. No reason to feel trapped. Steve caught him at the fire staircase once, back when he wasn't sure about anything and the past and the present still got mixed up in his brain. "If you wanna leave, Buck, the door is always open. You know? You don't have to jump out the window" Bucky left that night. Came back a week after, coffee in hand, and he never used the window to go out again.

There's much more to being alive than he ever thought there could be.  
Once, he went to a concert. It was dazzling. All the lights and sounds and shouts. He heard booming, but he was not scared. Steve asked. A thousand times. But the speakers didn't crash like a bomb, and the millions of bodies coliding against him weren't trying to smash his spine to pieces. They were dancing, together, filled with joy and drunk on music, sweaty. The grass under his sneakers; a conduct for the drum and the bass, to travel all the way from the stage to his chest, and pound.  
He kissed Steve so fiercely that night, before the glaring screen and the screaming crowd, to the beat of a song he loved.  
He wishes upon the dark sky, to be able to feel as intensely as he felt that time. For the lights to always be bright, and never blinding. He doesn't want to be afraid of his heart. But it is a great burden.  
He sighs, looks to the side. The black alarm clock signals four thirty seven AM.  
Steve walks through the door, says his name, inaudible. Says his name like the first time, like the thousand. Whispers his name into infinity, and it echoes back into eternity.  
A tear slides down his cheek. Steve doesn't falters, doesn't panic. Doesn't ask, either. He knows. He always knows.  
He leans down, chary, slow, his bad knee bending carefully, and kisses the tiny tear, salty and sweet and a goddamn miracle, if you asked Steve what it tasted like. A miracle. Nothing short of that. To be able to savor Bucky's raw sadness, instead of the bitter wind of the winter, and after, the dust he left behind when he fell from his hand. Any string of Buck he'd take, over his absence.  
He wonders if Bucky's loneliness feels like his own. So they have eachother. That's enough, almost everyday. But the world, it still kept on turning as they awaited, youth wasted, aging. It's silly, really. They're happy. But he still feels lost, at times. Like a star that went out a million years ago and is still hanging in the sky, watching all the supernovas flying.  
He looks at Bucky. Bucky's looking at him. Pale moonlight comes in through the blinds and makes his face silver, as a serpent's tongue. A gut feeling, a handful of hours filled with thoughts and thoughts and thoughts. What a waste. To be in any other place in the world but here. What a waste of his bony hands, to use them to create a flat, black and white image of the boy who sleeps beside him, instead of touching him, lighting life into his body, lying here, in full color.  
All the air is knocked out of Steve's lungs.  
Bucky breathes. Only for him.  
Bucky can hear the sirens. He thinks about death. It doesn't comfort him any more. Steve hears them, too. He thinks about people, how fragile they are. He wonders for how long he will be alive. At times, he believes maybe he already used up his nine cat-lives and all the luck he was bound to have.  
He wants to say, thank you. Wants to say something. Wants to talk to Bucky about the hurt, but he has no words to descibre the way his blood twists and turns inside his veins, so he leaves it. What's the use in lenguage when you have already felt every word there is?

"Hey," Bucky says. Paradise in his eyes, blue like sapphires. He was always much better at words than Steve could ever be.  
"Hey," Steve growls back, low and sunny, sweet like Tennessee honey. And when they kiss, dawn breaks over the city like a fever, and Bucky's dreams warm up and melt into the sunshine, and Steve's world snaps into strong color, and everything is alright.


	2. sunbeams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNE0mvsERqI

All of Steve's skin, bathed in the sunlight, golden boy that he is and always was. Bucky kisses a freckle in his shoulder, remembers the same marks on a much smaller body. Bless his body, he thinks. That can bend and stretch without breaking, big and small, built strong enough to hold his beautiful, everglowing soul, bursting up at the seams. His broken heart, a twin piece that matches his'. More often than not, beating so loud that Bucky could hear it from miles and miles away, a thumping in his ear that followed him everywhere, warmth in the lonely cold of winter.  
"Summer soldier", Bucky called Steve once, a lifetime ago. He laughed to tears. Little did they know.

Well into the night, Bucky likes to taste any and every inch of Steve. Curious, like a child maping out the world in the palm of his hand, he takes notes. When I touch him there, he makes a wonderful noise. He enjoys drawing sounds out of Steve, the way a magician pulls on a thread and keeps drawing scarves from inside his coat.

Roughly, I guess you could say Steve has changed.  
From a small boy filled with angst and teenage hormones, desperate to get this hunger beat out of him behind some dumpster, same way Bucky was desperate, to fuck it out of him between the velvet legs of women, their lipstick leaving much less loveable stains than Steve's red blood in his collar when he patched up his wounds, or even in alleways sometimes behind the docks, deep in the dark of night, following the hand of vile men who knew nothing of love but everything about a life that had you on the ropes, hiding everyday behind a facade, your face itching strangely, uncomfortable behind the mask.  
Steve changed alright, from an angry boy to a reckless soldier, from any other kid getting the shit kicked outta him to a commanding officer, all orders and decisions, the hard defined edges of planification, a battlefield reflecting on the transparent blue of his eyes, and the muscles he grew to carry the enormous weight of a gun that will rain death over the soil in the ground.  
From a frozen heart to a soul on fire, burning through Europe in an endless attempt to bring the past back to life. A hero, a war hero, a superhero.  
Trauma, bubbling its way up his skull from the back, like it or not, crippling like a ghost, spilling onto his dreams and his shaking hands without permission.  
There was a lot to learn about Steve, the hundreds of skins he's inhabited overlapping perfectly below Bucky's lips. He comes together like this, and it all makes sense.  
But it is curious, nonetheless, how Steve, in his specifics, in his singularities, when its just the both of them, has always been the same.  
Stubborn beyond his power, constantly fighting Bucky even as he kisses him softly.  
His frown when he's concentrated. His hands, too big all along, so gentle for all the blood they've been buried in, still firm, even as they shake, doodling Bucky's face from memory, just like a little girl may distractely scribble the drawing of a tiny heart at the corner of her test.  
It's his anger that never falters. Bucky loves it numb.  
He hugs it out of Steve, or lets him fight until its all out there in the world instead of inside him, so he doesnt have to live with it.  
His fists clutching at injustice of their own accord, a body that betrays him, even now, perfect as they all see it.  
The worry in the corner of his mouth when he can't help out the people he loves.  
A smirk, once in a while, sassy too, and even a little bit smug.  
The face of love, the most familiar one of all.  
It took a hundred years for them both to put a name to the caged humming bird that drove their hearts from the beginning.  
Love, he never forgot. It was the first thing he ever felt. Like a newborn. On that bridge, connecting his knuckles to Steve's face, a gut-driven action, willing to mess up his hand if it meant touching more of Steve’s skin. When he heard his voice, he shivered, just as small and afraid as he was the very first time his heart swollen tried to jump out of his chest as he looked into those baby blue eyes.

How much power is in a name? Names are sacred and names are love. There is power in knowing a name and there is power in giving one. Bucky had lived so many years without his’, and there he was, Steve. He had given him his name.  
All those years ago "Can I call you Bucky?", in a playground, all tough and bloodied. Bucky Barnes. Had a nice ring to it.  
“Bucky?” again, on that bridge, terrified, reaching out, love hitting him like a punch in the throat.  
And even now, when he felt shame for the ugly stain he left over Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes' good name, he could hide behind the "Bucky", a whisper as it left Steve's mouth. Bucky knew he would always be just that, something that was born with Steve and would die with him.  
He came to life when he sensed Steve's ribcage rise and fall under his touch, and he would perish with Steve's last breath someday. That was just fine by him.

But right herea and now, staring at the length of all of Steve's skin, bathed in the sunlight like that, he pictures that their happiness is the neverending feverish dream of an old man. The morning, only just peaking out from under the night outside. Sleepy, Steve looks up to find what he’s lost, and Bucky looks right down at him, proud, smile covered in honey, grin filled with ease. He plants a chaste kiss on that god given mouth of his, blond eyelashes fluttering like butterflies’ wings. And it’s right there, in this moment, when Bucky thinks, everything I’ve ever wanted, I’ve found it here.


	3. once seen, never regained or desired

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3a4Xm5LA64

"Take me home, Stevie" He pleaded. "Just for a lil while". And Steve will be damned if he ever declines anything that pair of lips ever asks.

  
He suggestively tells Shuri about a new arm, one that looks as human as possible, with fingers as long as his own, and that's more an element of love than weaponry. He wants to be able to touch and feel, nerves sparkling. He wants to caress Steve's cheek and sense the warmth blooming underneath his palm. He wants to sweat and splinter and bleed from hard work, and pluck flowers and ruffle her hair, instead of punching and killing and burning. He wants all of the lighter feelings. And Shuri, of course, brightest kid on planet earth and an absolute sunshine, understands that just fine, and obliges.

  
When Bucky hugs her goodbye, his left arm around her tiny waist, he can sense her long hair tickling over his skin somehow, which she only lets loose in front of family and close friends, and he smiles a smile so big and filled with fraternal love that she has to pull him in again, for once not making a smart remark, but instead giving in to the clear truth that she adores this man.

  
They fly by plane, and when they take off the ground, Bucky takes Steve’s shaking hand and kisses the back. They breath together. Everything is alright.

  
When they ride the ferry, Bucky's hair flies free in the wet air stream, and Steve feels very lucky.

  
Now that his head is all in one place, still messy and dizzy, but all his', Bucky seems to be marvelled by the world. He was always ahead of his time, Steve thinks with a smile, observing him as he twirls around in Times Square, eyes big as fried eggs and shining with the reflection of all the street sign lights, unlike Steve himself, who only remembers feeling afraid at the sight of those horrible abominations that passed for buildings now, big and monstrous and eating up the skyline. Bucky loved the future, its crowded cafeterias with a thousand different milkshakes, smoothies and Frappuccinos.

  
He said he didn’t like the way people treated their cars now. They were eating french fries in a cafeteria at midnight. When Steve laughed, Bucky frowned. “Now, hear me out, pal. At the risk of sounding like an old man, back in the day—” At that, they both cracked.

  
“Bucky, you are an old man” Steve’s giggle was affectionate and sparkling like soda.

  
“Just hear me out, alright? Back in the day, your car was your baby,” He gestured with his hands as he talked, an Italian reflex that made him look a lot like his father, Steve thought with nostalgia. “A car was luxury not everyone could have, something to be proud of and flaunt around in the streets. Now,” Bucky said, disappointed, “these bonafide office men, it's like they don’t even appreciate the poetry of it, they're just getting inside those machines to get from one place to another, and that's the end of it. It’s sad.”

  
Steve, head over heels and helpless as always, leaned in to savour the salt on Bucky’s lips, and when he opened his mouth to meet him, the whole entirety of New York city turned sepia-coloured just for them. He looked into Bucky’s eyes and saw, with a hint of surprise, a reflection of his own. The look of a man in love.

  
“Tell you what,” He was cut out for a life like this one, Steve thought, right from the start. He shuffled uncomfortably away from the edges of poverty, right from the beginning, constantly trying to score nicer clothes or get a bar of the best chocolate after dinner, working extra hours to have some money to spare on a little treat that they could share. Something flourished high on Steve’s chest at the thought of spoiling Bucky, now that they could afford it. “How ‘bout we rent a real nice car and drive around, huh? How’s that sound?”

  
And as he saw the smile that broke over Bucky’s face like the impending dawn, he couldn’t understand, for the life of him, why the historians insisted of labelling him as “poor”.

With Bucky by his side, Steve had always felt like the richest man in New York.

Who needs food inside their bellies when they’re filled with butterflies?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from "My Sad Self", a poem to New York City written by Allen Ginsberg.


End file.
